When I wrapped up the Rough Guide to Manga about a year ago this month (and hey, have I ever mentioned that it’s still on sale at finer book retailers online worldwide?), I listed 21 active mainstream manga publishers. Five of them — Aurora, DrMaster, Go! Comi, Infinity and now CMX — have since gone dormant or shut down, and Viz is 40 percent smaller in terms of workforce. Sure, one publisher also opened up during that time, but Kodansha’s release of all of two volumes of manga in six months — and re-releases of older material, at that — doesn’t exactly inspire much hope in me.

Jason Thompson has a fascnating article on the manga creator Ippongi Bang, in which he also chronicles the manga boom and bust of the 1990s and the heyday of Antarctic Press as a manga publisher: “Rumiko Takahashi may have been more famous, but Ippongi Bang would actually come to your convention and party with you.”

Who’s checking out the new manga this week? David Welsh and Sean Gaffney, that’s who! And Lori Henderson looks at this week’s all-ages comics and manga, a list that will soon be sparser now that CMX is shutting down.

No mangaka is excited to be scanlated. You are not providing a service – you are complicit in copyright violation. You are not “building an audience,” you are devaluing something that many people have worked hard to create. And for every one person who *might* buy a work *if* it comes out and *if* it’s available at a local book store when they want it, you’re giving someone else’s work – something you have no right to in the first place – away to hundreds, maybe thousands of people who will take it and ask for more. The only audience you are building is one made up of people who have no intention of paying for the privilege – or worse, paying you to “support the group,” while the mangaka who did the actual work gets nothing from it.

JoonAng Daily looks at sagging sales in the manhwa industry; sometimes being made into a movie can give a series a boost, but other times that’s not enough. The article points to piracy as the culprit, and artists are fighting back by putting their work on the web themselves.

At this point, there have been so many reactions to the shutdown of CMX that rather than rounding up the comments, I’ll just round up the roundups: I posted on the reactions at Robot 6, and the Good Comics for Kids bloggers pulled together a quick roundtable on the topic as well. Deb Aoki quotes some of the voices in the discussion (including mine), and Simon Jones (possibly NSFW) has a handy annotated list.

And returning to last week’s news, at Publishers Weekly, I talked to insiders and bloggers about the significance of the Viz layoffs.

Well, this is sad news: CMX Manga, the plucky little manga division of DC Comics that put out some nice little series but always seemed to fly under the radar, will be shutting down as of July 1. Here’s the official statement:

Over the course of the last six years, CMX has brought a diverse list of titles to America and we value the books and creators that we helped introduce to a new audience. Given the challenges that manga is facing in the American marketplace, we have decided that CMX will cease publishing new titles as of July 1, 2010.

The shuttering of the CMX line does not affect the best-selling series Megatokyo which will continue publication, now as a DC Comics title with story and art by Megatokyo’s award-winning creator Fred Gallagher.

We’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the efforts and dedication of the CMX staff and to thank our fans who have supported CMX.

– DC Comics Co-Publishers Jim Lee and Dan Didio

We are of the opinion that DC never really gave CMX the love they deserved—they didn’t give it much publicity, and the books were impossible to find in bookstores. But editor-in-chief Asako Suzuki and editor Jim Chadwick did an incredible job of picking great manga and bringing them over, including The Name of the Flower, Kiichi and the Magic Books, and Diamond Girl, which had my husband laughing out loud this weekend. We are going to miss them.

Ernesto Priego at Nieman Storyboard takes a look at two examples of autobiographical manga, Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s Black Blizzard and a Web 2.0 project called Manga Memoirs, in which writers of Canadian or Japanese descent tell brief stories about their lives and the best are chosen to be turned into manga, with professional artists doing the illustrations.

At Comics Alliance, David Brothers takes a look at Ax, the alt-manga anthology due out soon from Top Shelf, and how it may shatter all some common preconceptions.

It’s time for the next Manga Moveable Feast! Kate Dacey is the host, and the topic this month is Keiko Takemiya’s To Terra. To play, write your review or thoughts on the book, post it, and let Kate know; if you don’t have a blog, you can post at Kate’s. Enjoy!

News from Japan: Kodansha will publish an original English language manga based on Hagakure, a collection of stories told by real-life samurai Yamamoto Tsunetomo.

Metropolis magazine talks to Helen McCarthy about her book, The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga.

The New York Times looks at the popularity of manga among the extremely diverse groups of teens using the Queens libraries; this article is better than your standard run of manga-in-the-library articles, and librarian Christian Zabriskie does a great job of articulating why it is important to have manga available for his multicultural clientele.

A couple of personal notes: Congratulations to Manga Recon blogger Sam Kusek, who is graduating from Emerson College today. Well done! And happy birthday to Mail Order Ninja creator Josh Elder, who shares a birthday with me (although we are a few years apart).

News from Japan: Christopher Butcher points out what a great deal manga is if you buy it in Japan: Monthly Shonen Gangan, over 1100 pages of manga (including chapters of Fullmetal Alchemist and Stan Lee’s Heroman), plus two free gifts, for about five bucks. ANN has word of Sengoku Angelique Project, a games/history mashup that will combine characters from the game franchise Angelique with characters from the sengoku period of Japanese history, all drawn by Marie Hadori.

Jason Thompson’s second House of 1000 Manga column looks at Pilgrim Jäger, a historical (well, sort of) about a pair of traveling exorcists in Europe in a time of religious upheaval.

Roland Kelts thinks that “cool Japan” may be a little too cool—he sees a disconnect between the people who make manga and anime and the people who consume it:

Look up these companies online and visit their Web sites, and you won’t be surprised: If you find any information in English, it will likely be provided by the enterprising folks at the Anime News Network, an English-language news portal site, some posters on Wikipedia or ardent fans in their blogs. Quite a few industry producers and publishers still maintain Japanese-only Web presences, but that hardly matters. In either language, most of the industry’s online offerings are amateurish, hard to navigate, and worst of all, dull—just the opposite of their vaunted products.

Taking this a step further, manga lacks one of the greatest marketing tools in comics, the interaction between creators and fans. It’s not just the language difference or the distance; manga artists come to conventions and sit for interviews, and they put personal notes in their books, but everything they say is bland, rehearsed, and utterly trivial. There is no humor, just nervous giggles, and there are no meaningful conversations. The result is that while fans interact with the characters on the printed page, they have no dealings at all with the publishers or creators, and all of manga and anime seem to come from some bland corporate parent in the sky.

David Welsh looks at a misguided attempt to take down manga pirate sites by complaining to the advertisers that they contain child pornography.

More on Viz from Heidi MacDonald, who rounds up some reactions and updates at The Beat, and ICv2, which learns that senior vp of sales and marketing Gonzalo Ferreyra is among those let go, along with senior director of public relations Evelyn Dubocq. And this:

Despite the major downsizing, Viz plans to maintain its planned release schedules for both manga and anime, according to Senior Vice President Alvin Lu, and will also be exhibiting in its usual spot at San Diego Comic-Con.

Simon Jones adds his two cents, noting that Viz has shrunk by half in 2008.